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Van Wanten Etcetera

I read quite a bit. Not as much as I should, but enough. Most of the time the reading material is varied, anything from technical books on software I use, to superfluous fluff novels by authors like Dan Brown. One thing I am going to admit at the beginning of this post is, I don’t read a whole lot of Dutch literature. It’s not that I have something against it, it just doesn’t rise to the forefront of my reading experience. With that said, the new ad campaign to promote Dutch literature by Amsterdam based agency Van Wanten Etcetera, might just have me reading more.

This wonderful set of images were created by illustrator Souverein for Van Wanten Etcetera by literally carving books into portraits of the authors.

Each year the Col­lec­tive­Pro­mo­tion for Dutch Lit­er­a­ture organ­ises the “Dutch Book Week” to pro­mote Dutch ­lit­er­a­ture.Each year has a specif book genre that is profiled and this years choice was Autobiography. The theme “Geschreven­Portret­ten” translates to Writ­ten Por­traits, and to capture this Van Wan­ten Etcetera cre­ated a series of images that show the dif­fer­ent faces behind the Autobiogra­phies. AnneFrank, Vin­cent van Gogh, Louis van Gaal and Kader Abdol­lah. The illustrator Sou­verein made the art­work doing an amaz­ing of job cre­at­ing real­is­tic sculptural images of the authors. Even orig­i­nal book pages were used for the tex­tin­side the por­traits to get right struc­ture for each portrait.

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The finished pieces are really wonderful print advertisements. The photography that captures the artwork is superb, color pallets and typographic use works for the campaign. Simple clean layouts focus on the authors, and don’t overwhelm the subject. This is a visually stunning campaign for CPNB